Why Obama is winning

Unemployment is over 8 percent. Nearly 60 percent of Americans, according to a new poll, believe the country is on the wrong track. The number of people on food stamps is at a historic high and the median net worth of American families is at a 20-year low.

If it was true that winning elections is mostly a matter of numbers — as some political scientists and campaign operatives like to argue — Barack Obama’s reelection as president should be close to a mathematical impossibility. For much of this presidential election cycle, Republicans were counting on precisely this.

Story Continued Below

But 2012 is proving that politics isn’t just about numbers, and some traditional leading indicators look as if they are losing their predictive power.

With Obama holding a narrow but so far sturdy lead over Mitt Romney in polls, many incredulous Republicans sound like the Michael Dukakis character in a 1988 Saturday Night Live skit: “I can’t believe I’m losing to this guy.”

The phenomenon is the result of three powerful factors, according to interviews with some two dozen political veterans from both parties.

The first is a rapidly changing, deeply polarized electorate — one in which external circumstances don’t necessarily swing large numbers of voters whose minds are deeply made up — and also one that, on balance, is becoming more Democratic due to demographic trends. In an environment like this, Obama has not seen his political bottom fall out, as happened to George H.W. Bush in 1992, when Al Gore cited a barrage of statistics and taunted, “Everything that should be down is up, and everything that should be up is down.”

But a more hardened political landscape also means that — at the margins — candidate skills and attributes matter more than ever.

Obama’s durability, according to polling and interviews, is the result of a unique connection with voters as someone who broke racial barriers in 2008, his ability to evade much the blame for the recession and a brutally effective campaign.

Romney’s inability to capitalize on trends with the economy and national mood that would normally create a wide opening for a challenger is in large measure a reflection of his own defects as candidate and failure to sell himself to voters, according to these same sources, many of whom are Republicans hoping to beat Obama.

“He came into the general election with a very negative [image] rating and he has not effectively addressed that,” said longtime GOP pollster Jan van Lohuizen, who worked for Romney in 2008. “What they’ve been doing for five months hasn’t worked. At some point, they need to come to the conclusion that it’s not worked.”

“We’re running a good campaign so far but we’re not running a great campaign,” said Rep. Tom Cole (R-Okla.). “We’re going to have to run a great campaign to beat this guy.”

Below are the three political engines that are helping Obama defy the traditional laws of political gravity: